florian wrote:[With this in mind, a request-response mechanism (with it being mandatory for the individual to accept those tasks) somehow seems to make sense as well - as means of the tech to acknowledge that they have seen/noted the request - with a pure feed, wouldn't such feedback/acknowledgement be missing?
I understand your point, but the implementation of these feeds are just for the convenience of all parties. So they can from at a glance review what they have coming up over the next few days, weeks, etc. As stated before the iCal standard allows the embedding of a URL into the feed for each event. A simple click on the event, and the tech / supervisor can be taken directly to application. The ics feed is not going to give them enough information to complete the task or job, so they are going to have to login to the application anyways to get that info.
Cool, that's good. Is this an inhouse application or are there any standard applications (that you can point me to, out of interest) that provide such feeds?, Also, just to be clear, from a technical perspective, is this 'webcal' stuff, i.e. just something that you http-GET to and that comes back as a text/calendar "single large ics file"?
A couple of these are custom written applications by another company. But you are correct the idea is to use an http-GET to a single ics feed. These applications do remove jobs / tasks from the ics file after they are set to a certain state (i.e. archived, completed, etc).
We are developing an application that has this type of feed as well. It is available at: http://www.customtrack.net - With a demo feed of: http://demo.customtrack.net/A-A3KZ9P3W.ics - The demo resets itself every 4 hours, and there are only presently 3 appointments within that feed, but it will give you an idea of have the other applications work. The standard of the feed seems to be what we are using, where a random string is generated per user for a semi-secure feed. This feed is generated on the fly a php script and then using mod_rewrite we spit the output to what appears to be an .ics file.
Reviewing the application above may help give you some more insight, as the others work very similar, just for different industries, but all are service related. If you have any other questions, please let me know.
